Weaponized Incompetence
Why Trump 2.0 needs you to believe they're all a bunch of idiots
On a Saturday in mid-March, Chief Judge James E. Boasberg of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia was assigned a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Andry Hernández Romero, a hair stylist who fled Venezuela in 2024, declaring asylum as a victim of persecution due to his status as a gay man.
That lawsuit alleged the government was preparing to deport Romero, along with 237 other men to a for-profit terror confinement center in El Salvador known as CECOT, mere hours after President Donald Trump had signed an executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, under the pretense that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua represented an imminent threat to American national security.
Boasberg moved swiftly, granting a temporary injunction on the deportation of Romero and four other named plaintiffs, while scheduling a hearing for that afternoon on the larger question of whether the AEA could be applied prior to establishing the facts of the men’s association with the Venezuelan gang.
During that afternoon hearing, Boasberg repeatedly pressed the government’s lawyer over whether deportations under the Act were imminent.
“Your Honor, I don’t know the answer to that question,” was the reply. “I can certainly talk to them ASAP and see. You know, it is Saturday.”
So, Boasberg recessed the hearing at 5:22 p.m. so that the U.S. Attorney could check with the State Department to find out the answer to the judge’s question.
During that recess, at 5:26 p.m., the first flight bound for El Salvador took off. A second flight departed just 18 minutes later.
Returning to the courtroom 15 minutes after that, Judge Boasberg asked the lawyer what he had discovered.
“Your Honor, unfortunately I don't have many details to share,” replied the attorney. “I have talked to the clients who let me know the sort of operational details as to what is going on with raised potential national security issues.”
At 6:48 p.m., Judge Boasberg issues a verbal ruling, granting the ACLU’s request for an emergency injunction. Unsure at this point whether or not deportation flights are actually underway, Boasberg says, “…those people need to be returned to the United States. However that's accomplished, whether turning around a plane or not embarking anyone on the plane or those people covered by this on the plane, I leave to you. But this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”
By 7:30 p.m., Boasberg had issued a written order repeating these requirements.
Ten minutes later, a third deportation flight took off, this one carrying Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was already under a protective order and whose “mistaken” deportation would spark one of the first massive scandals of the new administration.
Boasberg has made it clear that he believes the obfuscations were intentional and has signaled his intent to move forward with contempt proceedings against the Justice Department.
Under cover of dullness
At every turn in this case, federal officials used the cloak of ignorance to muddy the waters, delay enforcement of judicial orders or simply flagrantly ignore those orders, usually by simply letting the message get “lost in the mail.”
Under Theodore Roosevelt, it was “the buck stops here.” Under Donald Trump it’s, “what buck? I don’t see any buck. I think so-and-so currently has the buck.”
This was clear recently when Trump was asked about his controversial pardons of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao and former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández. The former was convicted of knowingly using his cryptocurrency exchange to enable illegal activity, including drug and sex trafficking, even of minors. The latter had been sentenced to over 40 years for helping to smuggle over 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.
Pressed on those pardons by journalists, Trump pleaded ignorance.
Of Zhao, he told CBS’s Norah O’Donnell, “I don’t know who he is,” adding that “he got a four-month sentence or something like that. And I heard it was a Biden witch hunt.”
Trump’s excuse for pardoning Hernández was much the same.
“Well, I don’t know him,” he told Politico’s Dasha Burns. “And I know very little about him other than people said it was like, uh, an Obama/Biden type setup, where he was set up.”
Interestingly, one of the lead prosecutors on the Hernández case was Emil Bove, Trump’s former personal attorney and interim Attorney General, now serving as a federal judge in New York. At the time of his sentencing, Bove called Hernández a leader in, “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”
Fog of Wuh?
To date, the United States military has reportedly bombed at least thirty vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing an estimated 105 people in what the administration calls a war on narco-terrorism. At least two of those 105 were killed on September 5 after their boat had been disabled in a first missile strike. Under U.S. Military Code, it is a war crime to kill combatants who are no longer “in the fight.”
The example given of such a crime?
Bombing enemy combatant sailors in distress on the ocean.
So, when news leaked that just such a thing had been done with the blessing of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, lawmakers were understandably outraged.
Predictably, Hegseth and the White House comms team launched into a series of denials and accusations of fake news:
For his part, Trump had initially told reporters, “No, I wouldn’t have wanted that — not a second strike,” before eventually pivoting to say, “I support the decision to knock out the boats, and whoever is piloting those boat – most of them are gone, but whoever are piloting those boats, they’re guilty of trying to kill people in our country.”
(That last part is not strictly true, given that experts on the global drug trade have pointed out that none of these vessels could have reached the U.S. mainland on their own, so it’s most likely any drugs were headed for other regions. In fact, one survivor was actually picked up and returned to his native Ecuador, where the government was forced to release him after U.S. authorities presented no actual evidence of his crimes, most of it being at the bottom of the ocean.)
Once it became clear that there was, in fact, video of the second strike, Hegseth and others in the administration settled on a tone of defiance, arguing the double-tap was justified, that the surviving sailors may have radioed for help and were waving their arms, potentially seeking assistance to “remain in the fight.”
Throughout this scandal, Trump once again has played the part of distant bystander, bumbling into a problematic promise regarding releasing the video of the second strike.
“I don’t know what they have,” Trump said, “but whatever they have we’d certainly release, no problem.”
Later, in his interview with Politico, Trump confessed that he had, in fact, watched the full video, calling it “rough stuff.”
"Well, it looked like they were trying to turn back over the boat,” he noted, before ducking back behind cover. “But I don't get involved in that. That's up to them.”
It is hard to imagine any other president getting away with so consistently being oblivious of things happening within his administration, let alone someone like Trump, who carefully fosters the image of being deeply involved in everything from trade negotiations and peace treaties to Oval Office décor and renovations to the White House, Kennedy Center, downtown DC and more.
For his part, Hegseth ultimately landed on placing Navy SpecOps Commander Admiral Frank Bradley at the tip of the spear, supporting the decision while also bizarrely invoking the “fog of war,” when no one has ever argued that there was confusion about what was going on. I’m not sure why you would believe Hegseth is telling the truth but, if he is, he’s essentially admitting to dereliction of duty and an unwillingness to ensure the brass under his command comport themselves under the laws of military combat.
“Are they really this dumb?”
That is a question I find myself asking at least four times a week at this point.
If it’s not journalists being randomly inserted into ill-advised group chats discussing active military operations, it’s AG Pam Bondi handing right-wing influencers binders full of mostly recycled Epstein files. If it isn’t Donald Trump accusing the “Biden FBI” of planting agents in the crowds on January 6, 2021 (two weeks before Biden officially became president), it’s the Treasury Department bragging about rising bond market yields, despite such a thing being a sign of economic weakness, rather than strength.
One moment, Trump is claiming tariffs won’t lead to price increases, the next he’s lowering a bunch of them to (checks notes) bring down prices.
I could go on, but I’ve abused your attention spans enough already as it is. By now we should all be wondering whether this incompetence is a sign of rot, an intentional obfuscation meant to mask what is really going on, or a combination of the two.
My personal opinion would be the last option. This administration is chock-a-block with former TV personalities, celebrities and right-wing activists now LARPing as directors at Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the Department of Defense, Department of Education, Transportation Department and many more. At every level, Trump has stuffed his Cabinet with individuals whose most important quality is allegiance to him, first and foremost. It would be utterly shocking to hand these complex roles over to such a group and not end up with a never-ending shitshow.
By this time in his first term, 35% of Donald Trump’s administration had either moved on or been replaced, more than double any previous president. By the time his first term ended, more than 9 in 10 of the people around Trump had been replaced, a rate 14% higher than the president with the next-highest turnover rate, Reagan.
This time around though, even as scandals plague the new Trump regime at a much more prodigious rate, few top officials have left. Nearly all have reportedly merited the president’s ire at some point in time, and yet this Trump seems to content to let a far-less-capable group of individuals have a much longer leash.
Don’t get me wrong. These are not “intentionally stupid” people in the sense of Sun Tzu’s strategy of inviting arrogance in your opponent by appearing to be foolish, or Zhuangzi and his Useless Tree. Their incompetence is authentic, deep, and a secret known to all but themselves.
But that doesn’t make it any less useful.
Especially when you suddenly need a president or one of his secretaries to conveniently not know many details about the latest scandal that just landed.